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Three Charming Gadgets That Show the Weather as Sights and Sounds

This simple tool doesn't tell you the exact temperature, but it does let you know if you should grab a jacket on the way out the door.

We’re obsessed with the weather. Just look at your smartphone—you probably have at least a couple apps there, just to tell you whether it’s going to be sunny. “I currently have four,” says Martin Skelly, a creative technologist at Uniform, a London and Liverpool-based creative agency. Skelly and the designers at Uniform figured that there has to be a more friendly way to check the weather, given that we do it constantly. They came up with Weather Systems, a series of connected devices that alert you to wind, rain, and temperature.

The three little boxes are simple in their ambition. They use no numbers, only sound and visuals to communicate impending weather conditions. Precipitation data, for example, is expressed through little pins hitting a metal plate to mimic the sound of rain. A light rain is a pitter patter, while torrential storms increase the frequency of the sound. Wind speed is visualized through a vane that spins according to the intensity of the breeze before settling in the direction the wind is coming from. Then there’s temperature, which is shown through four colored faces that change as the air heats up and cools down. Blue signifies temperatures under 5 degrees (celsius), green for 5-10 degrees, yellow, 10 to 20 and red for anything over 20 degrees.

It’s an abstract view of data, and perhaps over-simplified depending on how much detail you’re used to getting. But Skelly says simplification—without losing context—is a big part of making data feel human. “We wanted the objects to feel like someone describing how hot outside it is right now rather than a computer telling you exactly the temperature,” he says.

An internet-connected device that alerts you to impending rain. The speed of the pins reflects the intensity of the rain. Looks like a downpour.

This genre of design thinking is called glance-able communication—the idea that you can glean information without much engagement. With Weather Systems, you can tell if you need an umbrella or if it’s warm enough for shorts with just a quick look. Of course, screens are good at this, too—which is the point of glance-able interfaces such as the Apple Watch. After all, a simple number does wonders for understanding temperature, the likelihood of rain, and wind speeds. But it's also boring. “A lot of people talk about big data and what big data might mean,” says Skelly. “But we’re almost looking at it from the other end,” he says. With Weather Systems, Uniform is interested in breaking big data into what might be meaningful and engaging for an individual. “We wanted to see what a highly customized, localized weather feed looks like when it doesn’t involve taking your smartphone out of your pocket.”